日本の「あし文化」の多角的考察 - 日本人の「はきもの」の着脱２ -

Abstract

The comparative study of Japanese ‘Foot culture’ - The act of shoes wearing and off Ⅱ – Kuriyama, Midori This study is based on the viewpoint of the human body as a symbol of its culture and focused on Japanese legs and feet. In this paper I reconsidered about Japanese acts of shoes wearing and off by investigating indoor-shoes (slippers). As a result, Japanese have a long history of wearing indoor-shoes while they have a custom to remove shoes for indoor. And modern Japanese continues this custom of wearing slippers when indoors. I suppose that their original reason of wearing indoor shoes was to get warm because of the function in Japanese traditional house and also Japanese high level of hygiene. For most modern Japanese wearing indoor shoes became a custom without being aware of its purpose and they developed this custom to have a tendency of changing shoes for each space which was divided by a line. I concluded that investigating Japanese act of shoes-off was also needed for research of Japanese foot culture.